


Nothing is Written

by ladygrey3



Category: Berserk (Anime & Manga)
Genre: Constellations, Emotions, F/M, Guts the confused bisexual, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Lawrence of Arabia References, M/M, Multi, Polyamory, Trauma and also jokes, War, Wet Dream
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-11
Updated: 2019-07-11
Packaged: 2020-06-26 13:45:34
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,025
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19769440
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ladygrey3/pseuds/ladygrey3
Summary: It was summertime, and they were in the garden of the king. Guts asked "So what are you going to do now?"





	Nothing is Written

It was summertime, and they were in the garden of the king. Guts asked “So what are you going to do now?”

Griffith lifted his pale eyebrows, inquiring. The hot sunlight glowed in his hair, turning it into a river of white flame. Even half-broken, with his bandages and his bulky crutches, Griffith managed to look prettier than Guts had ever looked in his life, which, for Guts’s money, served as proof that God probably didn’t exist and everything was basically unfair.

Not a useful thought. Anyway. “I mean,” he clarified, “you’re the new favourite. They said the place was impenetrable.”

“They always say it’s impenetrable,” Griffith said lightly.

“My point is,” Guts forged onwards, “that you can do whatever you want.”

Griffith seemed to consider this for a moment. A bird trilled sharply in a nearby bush. The sky above was a wild, radiant, blue, too blue to look at directly.

“I suppose I can,” he murmured. “Whatever I want. How extraordinary.”

Guts grinned, looking down at the flowers by their feet.

Griffith was silent for a moment. He rolled his head to one side and gazed at an indistinct point in the middle distance, somewhere beyond the trees and the sleek green grass.

“I can do what I want,” he said. “But I can’t want what I want.”

His voice was even, measured, as if reciting from memory.

Something moved in Guts’s chest, a feeling that was a little like wax thread pulling through the edge of a wound. He didn’t like it, and swallowed it down.

“That makes no goddamn sense,” he said.

Griffith laughed, his big sudden laugh like a child. “No, it doesn’t, does it?” he said. He stretched, the crutch leaning against the boundary wall. His smile was like a second sun.

“What a lovely day it is,” he said, after a moment. “What a very beautiful day.”

The first thing that Guts consciously liked about Casca was the way she ate. Initially, in those mad first days with the Hawks, she was little more than a blur of half-formed impressions; clever, dangerous, brown hands, the glint of light off a scrupulously sharpened sword, dark eyes hot with fury. But she ate her meals by Griffith’s campfire, and, as she glowered at Guts from across the flames, he had the opportunity to observe her in more detail.

Griffith ate with great neatness and care. His mouth was always clean, his long white fingers spotless. His style of eating was, like everything else about him, carefully cultivated, delicate, aristocratic. He gave the impression of being someone who would know what fork to use at the kind of dinner where multiple forks were in evidence. Guts, who only loosely knew how to use a fork at all, was bewildered and awed and a little bit frightened by this. It was hard to sit across the campfire from Griffith, stainless and perfectly collected, and not feel at least somewhat small and dirty.

Casca was not like Griffith. Sitting next to him, she shoveled food into her mouth, gulped, slurped, licked her fingers clean after every meal, like a cat. She ate quickly and gracelessly, focused mostly on efficiency. She ate like someone who knew that food would not always be available, so it was best to eat as much as possible as quickly as possible, before matters changed and hunger came back to prowl in the dark edges of the ring of fires. She ate like Guts ate.

He would learn, much later on, about the kind of hunger which Griffith had known also, and the lengths to which Griffith had gone to train all panic and haste out of himself. But that was later. In those first days, the raw and uncertain days, he only knew the someone was looking at him and paying attention to how he did things, and that person seemed brighter and cleaner than he could ever hope to be. But there was Casca, sitting next to him, scooping rice into her mouth with her hands, utterly unselfconscious. Part of him was grateful for that.

He would never mention this out loud. He barely admitted it to himself. But the nights when Casca was gone, eating with her men or sleeping off a hangover, he ate less, spoke less, did not meet Griffith’s eyes.

Initially, like everyone else, he had assumed that Griffith and Casca were fucking. It had seemed as natural as gravity—they were both beautiful, and there was that easy physical closeness between them, the way they seemed to anticipate and mirror each other’s actions. He tried not to think about it too much. Thinking about it made him feel weird. There was the slick cold sickness which accompanied all his thoughts about things like that, ever since he was eight, but there was something else too. A sort of pulling, an itch inside him. It was new and he did not care for it. The other feeling he at least sort of knew how to handle.

He was in the woods with Judeau and Corkus, finding and undoing the Chuder military’s ludicrous attempts at booby traps. Judeau asked where Casca was, and Guts replied that she was probably back in Griffith’s tent sucking his cock, to which Corkus responded with a loud and vivid bray of laughter that shocked birds from the trees.

“This is funny,” Guts said blankly.

“Oh dear,” Judeau sighed, and turned away. Dimly, Guts began to feel out the shape of what was happening here, what he had missed.

“Wow,” Corkus said, flicking fake tears out of his eyes with an artistic flourish. “That is the funniest shit I’ve heard in a while.”

Guts frowned. He was getting the itchy feeling again. “Griffith and Casca aren’t…”

Corkus snorted. “She wishes,” he said, and there was something in his voice that made Guts want to hit him, although this was admittedly not an uncommon reaction to Corkus speaking.

Judeau, a few feet ahead, said “Corkus,” in a way which managed to be both mild and as absolute as a punch in the gut. Corkus fell silent, scowling. They did not talk about it again.

After that, Guts started to notice certain things. The way Casca’s face looked when she listened to Griffith speak, as though she was suddenly more awake, more fully present in herself. The way she laughed at his few wry, sneaky, jokes. The way she allowed herself to be clumsy around him, when under all other circumstances she was tense and poised, her body used with the care and precision of a weapon. The way she looked at Griffith sometimes, when he wasn’t looking at her. The way Griffith did not look at her. The way Griffith did not look at anyone.

Guts did not feel particularly sorry for her. It struck him as an astonishingly foolish act, to fall in love with someone like Griffith. Griffith was not a person you could know, a person you could touch, like you were supposed to be able to touch the people you loved. After they had fought the second time, when Griffith had put his hands on Guts’s face, a part of Guts had been amazed that the touch did not burn him. Not because Griffith intended to hurt him, but simply because the blaze of Griffith was so clearly not meant to touch the skin of someone like Guts.

He reminded himself that Griffith was just a man, not some other thing. He couldn’t burn people with his touch and he was probably capable of falling in love. He just wasn’t in love with Casca, that was all. It wasn’t a big deal, and, more importantly, it was none of Guts’s goddamn business.

They came to a town called Whitefalls. Guts had heard of the place before; one of Gambino’s men had been from Whitefalls, and was prone to waxing on about it after he had a few cups of Gambino’s shitty homemade alcohol in him. The town was named for a waterfall, he said, which hung over the cliffs above it like a sheet of white silk. After it rained, the roar of it was like music. It was, he declared grandly, the most beautiful place in the world.

The waterfall was indeed very beautiful, draped in a fine veil of silver haze. The town below it was less so. The Black Rams had been there less than a day before. Smoke rose in a choking miasma above the gutted houses. What hadn’t been burned had been looted. The bodies in the streets had just started to draw flies. The sticky smell of blood hung in the air, wet and sweet.

Guts had been in a lot of towns like this one. He walked through the streets, eyeing the scarlet seams of blood between the cobblestones and the skeletal remains of the houses around him, like a forest of charred, misshapen trees. Griffith’s orders had been to find survivors and gather them in the central square, but the only people Guts had seen so far were either corpses or clearly about to be corpses very soon. As bleak as this fact was, Guts was a little bit grateful for the absence of survivors. He had no idea what he would have said to them.

He turned a corner and saw that there were two people sitting in the scorched wreckage of the next street over. One of them he recognized instantly as Casca. She was sitting on the ground, her long boots stretched out in front of her, and she did not look up as Guts turned the corner, just kept her gaze fixed on the person next to her.

This person was a girl. At a guess she was about eleven or twelve. Plump, dark hair, a nice face, not pretty but charming. That face was crusted with a dark mask of blood, and there was a visible gash running up her cheek almost to her eye, ragged and cruel, oozing a fine stream of blood and pus down her face. Her simple dress had been torn open from bodice to hem, and the soft child’s body beneath was stained with bruises. More blood clung to her legs, black and flaking. Beneath the blood, her face was dull, vacant, as empty as any of the corpses that lined the streets.

Casca had the corner of her cloak in one hand, and was touching the girl’s face with it, rubbing away the blood. Her touch was exquisitely gentle, more tender than Guts had ever seen it, as if the girl was her own daughter. She was speaking in a soft, even, murmur, words that were impossible to make out. As Guts watched, she shifted, and he saw that her other hand was holding that of the girl, resting on the ground between them. The girl’s sunken eyes moved slowly over to Casca’s face, and something flickered behind them, something that looked a little bit like the beginnings of awareness.

Guts stood in the mouth of the street. He heard a dim buzzing in the back of his skull, like a cloud of black flies. His body seemed to detach itself from him, quite cleanly and easily, and he stared at the girl, at the blood on her face, at the gentleness of Casca’s hands, and wanted to look away and didn’t look away.

He did not think that he made a noise, but the girl looked up and saw him. Her mouth opened, silently, and he watched as her eyes filled with a huge and shining fear, a terror too big for one body to hold. It moved under the blood like something alive, and then she was not a person anymore, not a girl with blood on her face. Just a thing, a kind of animal, that was scared.

He thought, stupidly, what’s wrong, what’s she looking at, and then he realized that it was, of course, him. The very large man with a sword, staring at her, probably looking a lot like the other men she had seen recently. He thought, oh, and that was the only thing he could think. There was a feeling in his heart of falling through someplace very cold and very dark.

The girl’s hand lifted and curled around a fold of Casca’s cloak, knuckles waxy and white. Casca paused and looked up. In the dark of the alley, her eyes were utterly black, like ink. She saw Guts. Her expression shifted in a very small and unreadable way. He looked at her, her stained hands and her mirror eyes, and realized that he had returned to his body, was once again a part of himself. He turned and walked out of the alley, back into the street he had just left.

The buzzing was very loud now. He moved about the dead town, trying to ignore it. Griffith had said to look for survivors. That was what he was doing. It was fine.

The first time he had seen a burned town he had been six. Gambino had taken him with a party of his men, saying that he should know what such a thing looked like. “This is what happens,” he had said. He did not specify exactly when or why it happened. Like a lot of Gambino’s life lessons, it had been open-ended and half-hearted, more an excuse to inflict damage than anything else. He had taken Guts into the town and then left to see if there was anything worth taking in the empty houses, and Guts had ended up standing on a burned street corner, staring at a decapitated corpse and really wishing that he was almost anywhere else. The air stank of blood; it was hard to breathe. He was scared of the bodies and he had the growing feeling that if he had to keep looking at them he was going to throw up.

It was Donovan who had come for him then. He had led Guts off the corner and instated him in a corner in one of the more intact houses, where there was a roof and he couldn’t see anything that was happening outside. “Just stay here,” he had said. “I’ll come get you when we’re leaving.” And Guts had smiled at him. Had been grateful.

He had been six. Too young to be interesting, maybe. Or maybe Donovan had been preparing his investment, anticipating later results. Thinking—correctly, as it turned out—that when Guts woke to someone standing over him, he would be more likely to hesitate if it was someone he knew, someone who had been kind to him.

God, he had been so stupid. So fucking stupid.

The terror on that girl’s face. You heard about people dying from fear like that. People had looked at him like that before, but usually only when he was actively about to stab them. Not usually when he was just sort of standing there.

Maybe he should be happy about this. After it happened with Donovan he had been so terrified that people would know, that they would somehow smell it on him, or see it, like a stain. That they would know he was weak, he couldn’t fight back, and anybody could do anything to him. Donovan had already known, and had to die, because in the terrible clarity of that morning Guts had realized that be would absolutely be back for more now that he knew exactly how easy it was. Even after Donovan was dead, Guts had lived in fear that he had told one of the others, or that it was just obvious now and everyone could tell. But apparently not. Apparently he no longer looked like the kind of child who had things done to him, and instead now looked like the kind of man who did things to other people. Which was what he wanted, wasn’t it? He was pretty sure it was. This was good, maybe.

Pointless to think about this. Pointless and stupid. Always pointless and stupid, but especially now.

He found a man with a broken leg hiding under a dead horse. Initially the man sobbed, screamed, made useless promises, but he quickly grew calm when Guts told him he was with the Band of the Hawk. As he babbled about how the Rams had killed his wife and burned his shop, Guts dragged him to the main square, where Griffith was waiting. He dumped the man with the small group of other survivors. Griffith said good job, and smiled.

Eleven survivors in total. Casca came to the square a few minutes later, supporting the girl. Guts turned away from her, not wanting to see if she was looking at him, not wanting to stare at her again. Griffith appointed a small group, led by Judeau, to take the survivors to the nearest town. One of the women kissed Griffith’s hand, wept extravagantly: _thank you, thank you, thank you._

Back at the camp, Casca came up to Guts and said “It wasn’t really you she was afraid of.”

Guts, who was comfortably full of bread and sausage and had been looking forward to forgetting this day had ever happened, said “Okay,” even though he had real doubts about this claim.

“She wasn’t thinking straight,” Casca said. In the firelight, her hair was alive with a secret blaze, like obsidian. “You just showed up at a bad time.”

Guts stared at her. It was very unlike Casca to offer this kind of reassurance, and for a moment he felt a sickening pulse of the old fear, the _does she know, can she tell_. “Okay,” he said again, and then, in case that didn’t sound sufficiently dismissive, “Whatever.”

Casca’s face twisted, her soft mouth drawing tight. “Should have expected that,” she muttered.

Guts peered at her. Up close, there was a sticky red stain to her eyes, and her face looked pinched, worn. She seemed somehow thinner than she had been this morning. “You doing okay?” he asked.

She glared at him. “Yes.”

He said nothing. She held his gaze for a moment, eyes hard. Then a dullness flickered across her vision. She looked down.

“It’s just hard,” she said. “Sometimes.”

She did not need to specify what was hard. It occurred to him that Casca spent a lot of time looking after people. Griffith, and all the men who called her Big Sister, and the ones like that girl, the strays and refuse they encountered over the course of their strange, violent, lives. It was as if she couldn’t help herself.

“Sit down,” he said.

For a long moment she stared at him silently, and then sat stiffly by the fire. She was still staring at him, as if daring him to object to a course of action which he himself had suggested. After a bit, he held out his water skin to her. She took it and drank deeply. She was careful about water in the way that she was about most things. Two swallows, not a drop wasted.

After a minute, Judeau came to take them to Griffith’s tent, in the interests of discussing their route for the next day. He did not speak to Casca for a long time after that.

Other people walked in the garden, between the fine silver trees. Women in bright soft dresses, like ornamental birds. He could hear the distant ripple of their voices.

“I heard Casca was sharp to you.”

Eyes slick with tears, teeth bared white and furious. _It’s your fault_. Guts shrugged uneasily. “It’s not a big deal. You know how she is.”

Griffith frowned delicately. “She shouldn’t have said that to you.”

The tree overhanging the stairs was laden with fat red fruit, glossy as blood. Guts squinted at it. “Why not? It’s not like she was wrong.”

Griffith turned to look at him, mouth twitching into a curious smile. “What?”

Guts shifted. “I mean, she was right. It was on me. If you hadn’t gone in there to save my dumb ass, you wouldn’t have got hurt.”

“Yes,” Griffith said slowly, “but if I hadn’t gone in there, you—and I mean no offense by this—you would undoubtedly have died.”

This struck Guts as a very odd thing to say. “Well, yeah,” he said, “but I don’t matter.”

Griffith looked at him, with his impossible eyes full of light. He was still half-smiling. “You matter to me,” he said.

Guts did not know how to respond to this. There was no sign of deceit or condescension in Griffith’s voice. His face was wide, clear, impassive. Guts stared at him, all of his words deserting him, leaving him both empty and full.

Griffith looked away, his smile faint. “It’s getting hot,” he said. “Let’s go inside.”

“Yeah,” Guts said weakly. “Okay.”

Griffith said things that no one else ever said. Griffith said things like _good idea, Guts_ or _well done_ or _I trust you with this_. Things like _you matter to me._ Things like _I want you_. He said these things like they were easy to say, and every time he did Guts felt them land on him like a wound. A mark that could not be healed or undone, changing who he was and what he wanted. Marking him as belonging to someone.  


There were very few things he would not do, if Griffith asked him to. He had come to accept that about himself. Maybe it wasn’t a good thing, maybe it was. It wasn’t under his control, so he did not concern himself with it.

Griffith was dangerous in that way. It wasn’t simply that you wanted to do what he wanted you to do; you wanted to be the person he wanted you to be. It was something in those perfect, opaque, eyes. Guts didn’t know much about poetry, but he knew that describing Griffith’s eyes as pieces of the sky would be not only overplayed but inadequate. It was more like they were each one a complete and separate sky. Griffith looked at you and you saw the far bright world he carried inside him, a world where everything was clean. And you wanted, more than anything, to be in that world. To be granted the chance to stay there with him.

Griffith said “I want you to kill someone for me,” and Guts was grateful. Grateful that even the ugly parts of him could be useful to Griffith. Not desirable, maybe, but useful. And that was enough. That was more than enough.

There were changes happening inside him. He could feel them, dark and nameless, like the seismic shiftings that came before an earthquake. They began in his mind and then found their way into his body.

The other raiders found it vaguely incredible that he did not frequent the endless throngs of prostitutes who followed battlefields like a storm cloud, but Guts simply did not really feel the need. He didn’t even really like to jerk off very much. Sometimes, in his tent, he would feel the desire come over him, a sort of heat or madness, and then he would make an attempt as quickly as he could manage, trying not to think about anything at all. He did not like to look at or touch the part of himself, and the fact that it continually insisted on making its presence known was more irritating than anything. It felt good, and if he got five minutes to himself he could usually make himself come, but the hot rush of the orgasm was invariably followed by a different rush of disgust and shame, so sudden and horrible it was like being doused in boiling water. His body became intolerable to him, nauseating and unbearable, and he wanted to burn his skin off or claw out his eyes. He tried to avoid the whole process unless it seemed necessary.

Dreams were easier, usually. He wasn’t in control of them, and therefore did not have to feel bad when he woke up hard or with a damp patch in the blankets. Mostly he dreamed of no one, an anodyne, faceless, blur of hands and mouths, as perfunctory and impersonal as if he was paying them to be there. On the rare occasions he did dream of people he knew, he always felt vaguely like he should apologize to them, but this did not happen often.

The really bad dreams were the ones where he dreamed about Donovan and woke up half-hard. Donovan saying _this doesn’t have to be bad for you_ and touching him. He usually didn’t sleep for a few days after those kinds of dreams.

It wasn’t a perfect system, but it worked for him. He had developed it over years of trial and error and it kept him more or less functional. He wasn’t thrilled with the whole situation, but it seemed largely unavoidable, so he managed it as best he could. And it all worked fine until he started dreaming about Casca, and then everything went straight to hell.

Initially he was annoyed, but he chalked it up to basic crossed wires. Casca was, objectively, beautiful, and he saw her a lot. She was probably showing up on the basis of novelty and would go away soon enough, as guests in his dreams usually did.

After sweating his way through a week and a half of dreams about Casca moaning and writhing and gasping, this theory seemed less solid. He started to become angry with her, despite knowing that this was irrational and unfair. It seemed like she was crawling around his head, wriggling her way into his dreams without his permission. After another week these feelings ebbed away and were replaced by a crushing wave of guilt which seemed to redouble in intensity whenever she looked at him. It was impossible to meet her gaze, knowing the things she did and said at night in his head. She would unquestionably hate him if she knew. Time passed and it became clear that he could not realistically keep ignoring her if they were both supposed to keep doing their jobs, so he resolved to just not think about it. For the most part he succeeded. It was constantly amazing to him how well this course of action usually worked. He kept having the dreams, but he stopped thinking of them as connected to the Casca he knew and interacted with in real life. And so he managed to keep himself sane, and things continued as normal, and he was doing fine again until he started to have dreams about Griffith.

And even that he thought he might have been able to handle until he started having dreams about both of them at once.

It was at that point he started to seriously consider the idea that Gambino had been right and he was cursed.

He wished that there was someone he could ask about this. Anyone he could go to and say can you want two people at once, is it possible, and even if it is, is it allowed? Someone to explain what was happening and tell him if it was okay. But there were only two people he really trusted and it was patently absurd to ask either of them.

He imagined asking Gambino about it. It was not hard to picture his response. Gambino might be dead, but his voice kept up a remarkably accurate and consistent presence in Guts’s head. _No, it’s not okay. It’s not normal. There’s something wrong with you. You’re fucked up. You’re sick._

After the initial shock and bewilderment of the Griffith-centric phenomenon had ebbed, it began to make a sort of backwards sense. It was logical, maybe even inevitable, that something like this would happen. For so long he had wanted nothing and now that desire finally crawled out from its hiding place, it turned out to be inverted, malformed like an animal kept too long from the light. He wanted something he not only could not have but was not allowed to want at all. And this made a certain amount of sense. Nothing else had ever been straightforward or easy, so this might as well be fucked up too.

If anything, it was the way he felt about Casca that made him uneasy, because it seemed so normal. Casca was beautiful and fierce and kind and smart. She was the sort of person that a man might fall in love with, which made Guts, knowing exactly what kind of thing he was, extremely suspicious. It seemed so unlikely that he was in love with her in the normal way. It had to be something stranger than that.

Eventually he decided that it was because Casca was good. He knew lots of good people, but Casca was special. She was good in a way that Griffith wasn’t and Guts definitely wasn’t either, a way that was fundamental to her nature, like the color of her hair or the tone of her voice when she got mad. She was honest and responsible and very kind. Kindness was not a quality that Guts would have ascribed to her until recently, but he had come to understand that Casca’s kindness was like blood; it wasn’t always visible from the surface, but if you looked just beneath, it ran deep and hot through everything she did. She knew the names of all the men under her command. She knew what was going on in their lives, and she knew when to clap them on the shoulder or sit and talk for the five minutes she had between other responsibilities. It was not what Guts would have thought of as a particularly female brand of kindness, but Casca was really the only woman he knew, so it was pretty clear he didn’t understand shit about women. Female or not, Casca was something remarkable. Guts decided that the only reason he could really want her was because he had bad things in him, and they saw the good things in her and wanted to ruin them. That had to be it, or something like that. The reason he wanted to be near her and touch her and listen to her talk had to be because the ugliness he knew lived in every cell of his body wanted to be close enough to do damage to her. It didn’t matter that mostly he felt like he wanted to just sort of watch her do the things she did and maybe not even say anything, just watch. He knew better than to trust himself.

Knowing this made it easier. If he hadn’t, he might have tried to do something stupid like talk to her about it, or let her touch the soft hairs on the back of her neck, the way he really wanted to sometimes when she was standing very close. This way, she was just like Griffith—someone he couldn’t touch. And it was easier like this. Simpler. It was always good to know where you stood with these things.

“Okay,” Corkus said. “Okay, okay. I have one. What’s the difference between a pregnant woman and a bottle cap?”

“Oh, God,” said Judeau. Pippin put his immense head in his hands. Across the fire, Casca’s face remained impassive, shadows flickering like ghost hands in the hollow of her throat.

Corkus’s grin was wide and manic. “You can unscrew a bottle cap.”

Gaston threw his head back and groaned. Judeau’s face screwed up like he had been hit. “Fuck, that’s terrible,” Guts said mildly. Corkus, ignoring all of this, gazed intently over the flames at Casca, whose face did not change at all. After a moment, she raised her eyebrows expectantly at him.

Corkus hissed. “Ah, dammit.”

“You really thought that one would work?” Judeau asked incredulously.

“Everybody loves that joke! It’s funny!” Corkus snarled. He jabbed an accusatory finger at Casca. “You have no sense of humor.”

“It’s been said,” Casca replied evenly.

“I have one,” Guts said.

There was a pause. A field of eyes stared at him, glittering in the inconstant light of the fire.

“Huh,” Judeau said, in a carefully toneless way which somehow managed to convey all the things he deliberately wasn’t saying more clearly than if he had spoken them aloud.

Corkus, less diplomatic, snorted. “Sure.”

“No, I do. Um.” Guts sat forward, throwing a quick glance at Casca. It was hard to make out her expression, but her eyes were fixed on him, alive with reflected sparks. Guts looked away, focused on the fire. “Okay. This is—my dad told me this one. What’s the difference between stabbing a man and killing a hog?”

A long pause. Corkus made an impatient gesture.

Guts grinned. “One is assaulting with intent to kill and the other one is killing with intent to salt.”

There was a pause. Judeau laughed a little, a pleased, surprised, cough of a laugh. Guts ignored him, staring over the flames at Casca. Her face remained still, smooth as water, for a long moment. Then her lips twitched, curling inwards, a motion so small and subtle it might have been a trick of the firelight if she hadn’t followed it with a glitter of teeth. She shook her head and looked down, grinning.

A roar rose from around the fire, like the exhalation of a great collective breath. Guts threw his hands in the air. Judeau laughed again, more whole-heartedly.

"Guts scores!” Rickert cried, grinning wildly.

“It wasn’t even funny,” Corkus said, bewildered.

Guts shrugged. “That’s the secret. Casca has no sense of humor, so you have to pick jokes no normal person would ever laugh at.”

“Oh, fuck you, Guts,” Casca said, but she was still grinning, and she reached for her mug to take a long gulp instead of to throw it at his head, which he had half-anticipated.

He was still coasting on the warm bubbly rush of all of it—the alcohol, the laughter, Casca and her smile—when the curtain of the big red tent on the other side of the fire moved aside. The firelight caught on Griffith’s hair, the white blur of his hand, pale and luminous as the moon which was absent from the sky tonight. The laughter ebbed to a low comfortable buzz. Casca looked behind her and her smile changed very slightly, grew warmer, more fragile.

“Guts,” Griffith said. “Will you join me in here, please? I want to talk about the attack pattern from today.”

“Aw, come on,” Guts said, before his brain could catch up with him and tell him this was the wrong response.

A ripple of delicate surprise crossed Griffith’s face; he was not, Guts knew, accustomed to having his requests met with aw, come on. “What?”

“It’s just,” Guts said awkwardly, “We’re playing Make Casca Laugh and I’m winning for once.”

Griffith came forward into the full light of the fire, his eyes glittering blue. “What on earth is Make Casca Laugh?”

Casca pinched the bridge of her nose between two fingers and muttered “Fuck.” Rickert laughed.

“Basically what it sounds like,” Guts said, fully committing himself to the downward plunge. “Casca doesn’t have, you know, a human soul, so sometimes we all tell jokes to see who can make her laugh. Or smile, because making her laugh is unrealistically difficult.”

“It’s a stupid game,” Casca muttered, staring at the ground. There was a faint flush across her nose, almost imperceptible in the dark.

For a moment Griffith stood, his head tilted slightly. Then a smile broke across his face like daylight, one of those radiant smiles that made the world around it a little bit shinier. “It sounds fun. I want to play.”

“Come on, that wouldn’t be fair,” Guts said, again before he could quite stop himself. Casca’s eyes lifted, black gashes, and fixed on him with a searing fury. Judeau winced slightly. Guts swallowed his own reflexive flinch and managed to not look at either Griffith or Casca, staring at the campfire instead.

“I don’t see why that would be unfair,” Griffith said. He was still smiling, and maybe it was part of Griffith’s unique ability to defy all the laws of nature that meant he could say that and actually sound like he meant it. Or maybe he genuinely did mean it. It was basically impossible to tell, with Griffith. You had to embrace the mystery.

“Forget it,” Guts said, as lightly as he could. And, because this was a good night, they did.

There were good nights. Bad ones, too, but lots of good ones. It made him nervous, sometimes, that the good ones were so frequent in their arrival and consistent in their quality. More than anything, though, it made him nervous that they happened when he wasn’t expecting them. They snuck up on him, predatory and merciless, and a part of him was definitely grateful for that, but a part of him was scared, too.

They were moving through occupied territory, and so there had to be a sentry for the night. The past few days they hadn’t seen much but abandoned towns and scorched fields, but Griffith took these things seriously, and because Griffith did, everyone else did too. Casca, of course, immediately volunteered, and, after a moment of hesitation, Guts followed suit. His nights recently had been ugly, threadbare things, scarred with restlessness and nightmares, and it would do little good to pretend that tonight would be any different. Besides, he was beginning to feel that Casca maybe wasn’t so bad after all. It wasn’t very long after the river and the cave, and he wasn’t quite stubborn enough to act like it hadn’t changed things, at least a little.

The night was cool and silky, lingering on the tender edge of fall chill. The camp was in a clearing in the middle of a forest. High ribbons of pale smoke twisted above the treetops. Casca picked a sprawling ash tree with a good view of the camp as the place to sit, and then looked at Guts as if expecting him to argue, but he simply shrugged. She was right about this, as she was about so many things. Casca had the annoying habit of often being right, and the infuriating habit of almost never being smug about it. He figured it was best to just not complain.

The camp was a cheerful chaos of light and laughter and chatter, and then it was slowly eclipsed by the growing weight of the night. Tents went up, fires died to glowing pockmarks in the ground. Griffith vanished inside the big red tent and dwelt there for a long time, occasionally brushing up against the walls, silhouetted in candlelight, like a moth in a paper lantern. Then even that light went out. The camp lay still and silent in the dark, as desolate as one of the dead villages they had passed on the way here. High above, the moon hung sharp, silver, impossibly bright and impossibly distant, and the world glittered with witch light. It was a perfectly clear night, and the stars sketched out complex geometries of frozen light above them. They lay under the tree and looked up, and Casca, her voice hushed as if in prayer, pointed out the constellations, drawing them with her fingertip. There was the broken tower, and the vast snake which had felled it, its eyes two stars that shone poisonous gold. There was the great bird, sweeping wings of white fire across the dark (“Like Griffith,” Guts said, and Casca laughed a little, surprised but clearly pleased.)

“That one’s my favourite,” she said, pointing to a patch of sky which, to Guts, looked mostly like an incoherent scatter of crystals.

He shifted, sliding his sword to the side so it didn’t dig into his spine. “What is it?”

“That one is Ystar. She was a goddess of war. See, there’s her head, and there’s her bow and arrow. She was always my favourite, even when I was a little kid.” Casca folded her arm behind her head, staring upwards. In the silver light, talking like this, she looked much younger than she usually did. Much closer to the age she actually was, Guts guessed.

“The only woman with a weapon,” he said. “I guess you were always going to be you.”

“I guess I was,” Casca said.

There was something in the way she said it which was just on the edge of flat, or dull. Guts said “She should have a sword, though, if she was really going to be your favourite.”

A very quick, faint, smile, like a bright shadow. “Believe it or not, I was actually pretty upset about that when I was younger.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. I had very definite opinions about what weapon you were supposed to have if you were a real warrior goddess.”

“I bet. Who taught you all this stuff, anyway?”

“My mother,” Casca said, and this time her voice was unequivocally flat. “And my brothers, a little.”

“Oh,” Guts said, and then felt silent. If he were someone else—if he were Griffith, maybe—he might know something to say that wasn’t stupid or clumsy or obviously offensive. As it was, he thought about Gambino, and how badly he did not want to talk to Casca about Gambino, ever, and kept his mouth shut. Sometimes not talking about things was just better.

After a moment Casca rescued him from the consuming silence by asking “Which one do you like?”

He blinked. “What, out of the ones you just told me about?”

“Yeah, why not.”

“Alright, I guess. Um.” He scanned the vast expanse of light and dark. Each star like the point of a glass needle, and all of them a part of this tangle of interlocking stories that seemed to cover the entire world. “I like the one that’s a scorpion.”

“Really?” Her smile this time was genuine, and she pulled herself up to look at him. “Why that one?”

He stirred, vaguely disquieted for reasons he could not identify. “I just like the curly bit at the end. I don’t have any big reason for why I like it. I’m not a particularly complicated person.”

“I don’t know about that,” she said, leaning back again.

The disquiet did not go away. He shifted again; the sword had been replaced by a tree root. “It’s not a very good reason. I’ll try to think of a better one.”

“No. Curly bits. I like it.” She was smiling.

“Curly stars,” he said, for no real reason, but she laughed, even though it was a very dumb thing to say, and he had the strange feeling he had around her sometimes, like he was actually there, in his body, in the moment that was happening, more than he had ever been in his life.

They talked for a little while after that, and then it was very late, and a gauzy haze of clouds began to billow across the stars. He realized after an unknown amount of time that Casca hadn’t said anything for a while, and when he looked over at her he saw she was asleep. In her armor, cloak tangled around her shoulders, sword propped up against the tree by her side. Her lips were slightly parted and her eyelashes were very dark, like lines of ink on the slope of her cheekbones. He decided to let her sleep. She had been working harder than anyone recently, harder maybe even than Griffith; though such a thing seemed impossible, if anyone could manage it it was Casca. There were delicate shadows around her eyes. She should get some sleep, even though she would probably be angry at him when she woke up. It was a quiet night. Nothing was going to happen, and if it did he had great faith in his ability to yell loud enough to wake everyone in camp up.

It occurred to him that it was nice that Casca felt okay falling asleep around him. He was pretty sure that up until fairly recently Casca would rather have died a thousand deaths of exhaustion than so much as yawn in his presence, but that was apparently not the case anymore and he was alright with that. He had suspected for a long time that Casca divided the word into the very small category of People Who Were Safe and the much larger category of People Who Were Not Safe, and he suspected this because he himself divided the world this way as well. The sleeping body next to him seemed to indicate that he had moved from one category to another, and whether or not he deserved that trust, it felt good to have it.

It started to rain. Fine cool droplets collected on the branches of the tree and fell into his face. He could hear the dim tapping of rain on canvas from the camp. Next to him Casca shifted in her sleep, her face creasing slightly, but did not wake. Guts hesitated for a moment and then gathered his cloak in one fist and held his arm out over her head, so that the rain gathered on the fabric and slid down against the tree without touching her. The fever had not been so long ago; it wouldn’t do for her to get sick again so quickly.

The rain ran cool fingers through his hair and caught on his eyelashes. He looked up at the tree branches above him, which curved and twined like black lace against the equally black sky. The air was full of the soft atonal music of the rain. Droplets landed on Casca’s boots and slid down to cling to the grass, silver as mercury. It was cool, but not unpleasantly so. With the stars and moon obscured by clouds, there was just barely enough light to see the outline of Casca’s sleeping face against his cloak, as delicate as the lines that the rain traced on the bark of the tree.

A thought came to him, as suddenly as if someone else had spoken it in his ear: _I am very happy right now_. Startled, he examined this thought, and discovered that it was true. He was happy, or at least he was feeling something bright and good that seemed a whole lot like happiness. Sitting in grass that was quickly turning to mud, in the middle of the night, holding his cloak over Casca’s head, and he could feel the good bright thing opening up inside his chest like a white flower. He was wet and the tree root was still digging into his back and he understood that there was nowhere else in the world he wanted to be, and nothing else in the world he wanted to be doing. It was a strange knowledge to have. It seemed like it couldn’t be real, but assuredly this was all real; the rain, the black sky, and Casca, asleep next to him.

The one thing that would have made it better would be if Griffith was here. If by some miracle Griffith came out of his tent and saw them and came over, and they could talk, quietly, as Casca slept. He saw the glitter of the rain on Griffith’s skin and heard the quiet ripple of his laughter with such clarity that it almost seemed real for a moment, and he knew that if it had been real, this would probably have been the best moment of his life. If the three of them were together, this would be the best that things had ever been. But of course Griffith wasn’t there. There was no reason at all why he would be.

The rain stopped, after a while, but Casca stayed asleep. A curl of wet hair slid off of her cheek and came to rest against Guts’s shoulder. He allowed himself the small but significant pleasure of not moving it until the morning, when she stirred and began to wake.

**Author's Note:**

> Title and summary quote both stolen from Lawrence of Arabia, a movie which everyone should watch. I do not advocate falling in love with Griffith.


End file.
